Ever find your concentration disrupted at work, only not to be able to get back “in the zone” for quite sometime later? Maybe you tend to procrastinate when assigned a major responsibility instead of immediately attending to it.
Productivity is not easy to come by. You need to channelize your energy well and get “into the mood” for it, where you only focus on the task at hand.
Interruption, procrastination,and inaccurate plans are the most damaging productivity killers there are.
You might not know it, but a colleague tapping on your shoulder when you are busy at work can leave you scampering to get back to your pre-interruption attentive work state for the rest of your workday. When a fellow team-member admits to not having pulled in his/her share of work for your collaborative project, and your delivery schedule suffers, it takes a toll on your productivity all the same.
However, there’s good news yet, and you need not lose hope.
You can find a way to work around these productivity killers and still emerge as a productive person. How do you do this? Find out below.
How to Stop Productivity Killers from Affecting Your Work
Productivity killers can subject our work efforts to enormous harm because we no longer work a set 9-5 workweek. Most workplaces require their employees to finish their daily work allotment before they can log off from work. The minute you let any of the above-listed notorious productivity killers into your workspace, you extend your work hours and, by default, the time you spend in the office.
Try out these tips to help fight them:
1. Filter through and prioritize the interruptions coming you way
According to research, we are all interrupted every 8 minutes. It makes us lose our train of thought and wastes time available to us to get a job done.
You can assign incoming interruptions based on their urgency and tackle them accordingly. You can classify these interruptions as Urgent and Important, Urgent but Not Important, Not Urgent but Important and Neither Urgent or Important respectively. You can deal with the urgent and important task immediately, schedule the urgent but not important task for later, delegate the not urgent but important task to someone else and simply say not to extra incoming tasks that serve no purpose and will only waste time.
2. Get to the root of why you procrastinate, cut these off
Maybe the task seems overwhelming, boring or exhausting. You can split up the task into smaller chunks, inspire yourself to work on it by trying to remind yourself of the value it provides, and take frequent re-energizing breaks to bring your productivity back on track.
3. Plan projects in 2 stages
Get your project managers to plan their project deliveries in phases. Each phase should be delivered within a milestone date. Then, assemble your project team and map out how you plan to have the project ready incrementally by these milestone dates together.
Proactively Fight off Productivity Killers
The best way to tackle productivity killers is to ward them off proactively. Come up with an availability schedule to keep your colleagues from interrupting you when you are busy. Create time for productivity breaks on your work calendar.
Schedule a time to deal with potential interruptions and keep rescheduling tasks based on priority. You will soon see that you’ve been able to revive your productivity at work successfully.
Need More Tips?
Check out this infographic by Wrike project schedule tools:
